By Ava Stern

If fate cannot be shaped by human hands, it must be written in the stars.

Ancient Romans saw heavenly processes as symbols of divine decision-making. Whether the moon and sun were gods themselves, or whether they represented their workings, there was no doubt they were the difference between life and death. The absence of Apollo’s chariot wilted the plants, froze the streams; his twin, Diana, gracefully replaced him each night, guiding stumbling figures below her.

Iterations of this celestial story have been traced throughout the entirety of human history — great expanses invariably piquing the imagination. Sea gods wrangle serpents in unseeable, murky depths, as Zeus hurls thunderbolts into the horizon. Today, though this Earthly mysticism has dimmed with modernity, the unknowable contains more than a glimpse of that magic.

Straddling North America lies a mountain range rife with the stateliness that spurs this kind of ideation. A sixteen-year-old girl had been completely consumed by her weeks in the Rockies. The old men mountains dwarfed her with their majesty, forming an Eden in which she was pleasantly insignificant. A sensation of smallness wrapped its warm arms around her; nothing could harm her, she felt, buried as she was in this valley.

When she received a crisp, corporate envelope upon cresting Anchor Mountain, she felt suddenly infringed upon by humanity. Her dirt-encrusted fingernails sullied the eggshell paper as she popped her thumb under the flap. This envelope, this symbol of modern bureaucracy should not exist in her world­ of ridges and cracked branches.

The girl’s mother had written the letter, describing in detail the things that needed to be done by the fall. She hadn’t left tightly wound highways and cookie-cutter roofs as far behind as she might have hoped. She still had to sing in front of everyone at her sister’s bat mitzvah; she still had to find a homecoming date. She was a sixteen-year-old girl, and she was starting her junior year of high school in two weeks.

My inner world, if too self-contained, can become a new frontier – impossible to navigate. Neurons spit at each other a trillion times a second, my thoughts boiling over through my eyes and mouth.

Look up, I tell myself, See something magnificent.

I reframe myself in my true context by staring into the face of the abyss. It’s an attraction to that ancient unknown. Mystery envelops me as it wipes me clean. I wonder about the boundaries of the known universe and their never-ending expansion. While I do that, I lose myself; I float.

I am not alone in experiencing smallness as spirituality. Humanity was born with an itch for the gargantuan, for the ultra-powerful, for what is religion if not the search for something bigger than ourselves? It’s a comfort to erase ourselves for the sake of something incomprehensible. If fate cannot be shaped by human hands, it must be written in the stars.

Three years after the girl opened that letter, she sat with a new group of friends, each ignoring the sensation of grass tickling their bare skin and bugs nibbling at their contentment. The moon glowed bright above them, inspiring the girl below to howl, her mouth forming a perfect ‘o.’

The moon told me to, she said.

They felt especially 19 at this moment: sitting and smoking at an outdoor concert, the cosmos spinning with them at the nexus. Here they lounged, some of them falling in love, others in love with living. A boy, face luminous, turned to the girl sitting next to him. But she wasn’t looking back. She was looking up. 

The world of celestial bodies lacks consciousness but it isn’t without significance. There is no end to the emotion inherent to the universe. These giants live and die like us, I’ve learned, but they are governed by their own rules. Gravity and electromagnetism play God. No one oversees the birth of a star; there is no one there to hesitate, to say no, wait, what if. That which is impenetrable inspires the most awe because we can’t understand it. These things rule themselves, a trait I wish I could claim for my own.

The girl contemplated these things as she watched the moon on that balmy night. She filled that impossible sublimity with empathy, imagining a sky that somehow cared. It’s seen her before. It’s seen her a million times over. It keeps her and her whole world alive, consciously or not.

Her internal trembling quiets as she mulls this over. She lets her fingers intertwine with those of that boy next to her. Why not? Nothing existed at that moment except for her, her people, her feelings, her music. The sky will not fall if she brushes her thumb across his calloused palm, not even if she kisses him.

Let your heart still, child. I will be here through your fear.

Two minutes of totality. A couple months after that night on the lawn, the moon was going to pass in front of the sun, winking it out like a lightbulb. For weeks leading up to the celestial event, the girl has been preparing, stressing about where to obtain protective sunglasses.

“Fuck, it’s going to be cloudy.”

This only happens every hundred years, every six months, or maybe it’s never come to Austin before. Wherever the scientific truth lies, the profundity is clear: this is happening right here, right now, in front of her eyes. Our eternal source of life, the interminable father of our solar system will die, then be resurrected. She could reasonably never see such a thing again for as long as she lives. Though it will happen millions upon millions of times again, her brief spot of existence will overlap it only today.

The moon creeps, teasing the expectant creatures down below. Blackness, more bluish-gray, engulfs them. The crowd cheers. Tears fall to the darkened ground as the girl removes her glasses. For two minutes, she exists amidst a miracle. She understands why religious painters depict deities with bright coronas; this is her crowned God, revealed only for a moment.

Big things cradle me. They smooth back my hair and smile softly into my face. They tell me: you cannot move me. You cannot shift stars. Natural processes maintain our order, so you can drop your shoulders. We created the material from which you are composed. Your energy can be neither created nor destroyed; you will return to us someday. Breathe and let your oxygen rejoin its brothers. If you forget, simply look up. We will be here. ■